LesRonces wrote:Is a linguistics degree a BA ? I always thought linguistics was a science.
BA in Germany too. Actually, like all social sciences it's some very weird and unrigorous mix of flawed statistics combined with shoddy theory, so neither scientifically nor philosophically rigorous enough in most cases. This started to become clear to me when I had to take Pragmatics (Linguistics) and Theory of Action (Philosophy of Language) together in the same semester, because I happened to be studying two different degrees at the same time. The content is exactly the same, but the attitude is entirely different. What we criticised and totally took apart for being logically flawed or not conceptually rigorous in the philosophy course I actually had to learn by heart as if it was divine truth in the linguistics course. Since then I have a hard time taking linguistics seriously. Some of it is a tad more scientific - like conversation analysis, natural language processing, that sort of thing - but there is an awful lot of hand-wavy theory elevated to fact without proper justification.
Also, apart from often being methodically flawed the whole logic of it also doesn't fit the scientific method. In science it usually goes like this: hypothesis -> experimental confirmation -> conceptually not very rigorous theory / no theory at all. In the social sciences it usually goes: conceptually not very rigorous theory=hypothesis -> "experimental" confirmation with severe confirmation bias and otherwise flawed methods. Anyone with a proper science training will find social sciences entirely unscientific and anyone trained in philosophy will find their theories extremely shoddy and full of holes. Bad combination, because that means any proper scientist and philosopher needs about 5 minutes to tear down the whole house of cards. You can have holes in your theory if your scientific method is sound, and you can have flawed scientific methods if your theory is bad, but if you have both you have basically wasted your time. Of course there are always gems of insight hidden in the mess and single studies that are entirely flawless conceptually or methodically, usually coming from people with a philosophy or science background. Most of it makes me shudder though! Linguistics happens to be one of the more rigorous subjects of the social sciences and has some bits that overlap with computer science, so it's not quite as bad as Media Studies or Sociology. Still, definitely not science.
By the way, all of it could be easily remedied if social scientists were required to get a decent level of philosophical AND scientific training, but well, the current policy is not to encourage people to go into the humanities at all.